Exclusive: After VC fund, startup networking platform Scope to launch angel fund this year; see details – The Financial Express

Invite-only networking and fundraising platform for startups Scope, which launched its $45 million venture capital fund in December last year, is now looking to set up an angel fund for early-stage startups in the country. In an interaction with FE Aspire, Scope’s Founder and CEO Appalla Saikiran said the new fund modelled on the concept of Village Global – an early-stage venture firm with a network of 400 founders globally such as Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, etc., – will likely come up by October this year.

The new angel fund with a corpus of around $15 million will invest in startups across sectors, akin to syndicate funds involving a group of investors that pool capital to invest into deals.

“We will be using the concept of Village Global to launch this new fund and bring on board up to 35 top-tier founders-cum-angel investors who will mostly be high-networth individuals (HNIs),” Saikiran said.

Village Global, based in California, help startups with new customer introductions, finding co-founders, getting advice from experts, hiring early employees, and connecting with other startup founders as well apart from raising capital.

Scope, which focuses on startups seeking seed or pre-series A funding, claimed that it currently has over 20,000 angel investors, more than 5,000 VCs and 400 family offices on its networking platform, facilitating funding for more than 400 startups so far since its launch in 2021.

Scope circulates the funding opportunities in startups among this network of investors including Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, New Enterprise Associates NEA), and more. 

The angels for the new sector-agnostic fund are expected to be from this pool of investors on Scope. In contrast, the venture capital fund launched by Scope last year focuses on startups in the fintech and gaming sectors.

Scope, through its networking and fundraising platform, “has closed around 17 funding deals for startups in the past six months in India and the US mostly in the deep tech and gaming space,” said Saikiran.  

The company had raised around $6 million from Partners Value fund in January this year to expand to the US market and tap further into the startup ecosystem.

The platform is similar to startup investment platforms launched in India in the past decade including LetsVenture, ah! Ventures, AngelList, and others.